Ask HN: Year of Linux Desktop is fun with LLMs

[mirekrusin]

I'm wondering if others are also having recently blast using Linux desktop thanks to Claude/Codex/Grok CLIs?

As 20y daily Mac user, occasionally using Linux as desktop, my personal daily OS now gravitated towards Linux desktop in recent months quite a lot.

I attribute it purely to LLM CLIs. Even my old 2012 Intel iMac 27" on Linux became really good and pleasant machine to use. After dusting it off and setting it up I don't want to give it away anymore.

Solutions to quirks/customizations seem to be few prompts away and it's actually fun to do as well.

Things like brightness on Apple Studio/iMac not working are not only solved in few minutes but solved really well (native OSD indistinguishable from system volume, perfect latency, mapped to gamma 2.2 perceptual curve etc), Magic Keyboard/macOS key bindings muscle memory which normally was painful is solved in few minutes, Steam not starting C&C on old GPU/mismatched driver versions - sorted out in few minutes etc etc

It goes deeper as well, ie. compiling KASAN kernel and reproducing some edge race on current hardware is something I'd never have time to do, investigating, learning so many specialized details etc. to get to the bottom of it, but now it feels fun.

Anybody else experiencing something similar?

[al_borland]

It’s funny, as Linux became more viable as a daily driver, it became less about the system itself and more about how it integrated into the rest of my life. That isn’t something an LLM will solve for me.

[matbanik]

I enjoy the TUI apps on Linux as well as OpenCode, Codex and Claude Code. I used to use Linux only for QA work but now that Devs are using more AI to produce better quality apps that are surpassing Windows UI quality it is way more enjoyable since I noticed way better graphics and more satisfying responsiveness from UI. I feel like TUI stuff works way better in Linux. Windows seems to have a lot of bugs. For example Antigravity's agy cli is way better in Linux than Windows.

[alFReD-NSH]

I heard of a story had an issue with one of the drivers, if I remember right regarding audio, after letting LLM loose, making patches and recmpiling the kernel, it worked. They even shared the patch as a pull request or something which of course the person, mentioned that it was out of his depth so he won't be working on the feedback.

I thought this was a quite a success story, normally I wouldn't compile my own kernel, let alone making code changes. LLMs can be quite empowering! Of course, always keep a backup!